Devoted

THE CURRENT CINEMA reviews of "Keeping the Faith" and "East is East"... In “Keeping the Faith,” two thirteen-year- old New York boys, Jake and Brian, take up with a girl at their school, Anna, a flirtatious and fearless blonde who leaps around the streets and playgrounds like a beautiful untamed animal. Both boys are mesmerized by her... one day Anna ( Jenna Elfman), now a shiny, big-deal corporate consultant, steps off an airplane from the Coast. She’s nervy and direct, as quick as ever, and the two boys—they are men but still very boyish—fall in love with her all over again. There are, however, a few problems. Brian (Edward Norton) is now a priest, with a largely Hispanic congregation on the Upper West Side, and he takes his vow of celibacy seriously. And Jake (Ben Stiller) is a dynamic young rabbi... Scene by scene, “Keeping the Faith” plays well, sometimes extremely well, with lots of goofy and charming detail. (The trailer, by the way, doesn’t suggest the movie’s quality.) I was impressed by Norton’s acumen as an entertainer and a storyteller: “Keeping the Faith” skirts about a dozen potential traps and embarrassments and grows in emotional force, and by the end I had to brush away a tear or two... Most of “Keeping the Faith” is fresh as rain—it’s a great spring movie, and a great date movie, too. Norton, it turns out, has an appreciation of the romantic landscapes and moods of Manhattan comparable to Woody Allen’s. (It’s a high tribute to the city that Anna comes to the center of corporate ambition and winds up finding her inner self amid the towers. New York as a vale of soulmaking?) At the same time, Norton and Blumberg have a looser, more accommodating sense of the city’s pleasures than Allen; they’re not shamed, as he is, by ethnicity. All in all, this is a considerable directorial debut. Norton may make that Dostoyevskian drama someday, but if he wants to stick with romantic comedy, that’s good enough for me... The great Indian actor Om Puri (of “My Son the Fanatic”) almost makes “East Is East” worth seeing. He plays George Khan, Pakistani patriarch and tyrant, husband of the stoical Englishwoman Ella (Linda Bassett), and father of seven children... “East Is East” is family melodrama, not drama, and almost embarrassingly revealing of its stage origins. There must be five scenes in which the children are doing something forbidden, only to scatter as George comes into the house. There’s some dim joking about a “late” circumcision that I could have done without and a curtain line regarding a cup of tea that generations of bad plays have brewed into inanity. See it if you want a powerful dose of Puri, but you’d be better off renting “My Son the Fanatic,” a much finer movie.